j.r. leonard

The question you need to ask is what are you creating here. I am not sure anybody in social media space thinks this question through. Lack of a design parameter that fundamental means you’re allowing something to be created. This can be good or bad, in the general case.

In the specific case of Twitter, what has evolved through pretty obvious incentives is a system that has pretty bad defaults. The best parts of Twitter, on the other hand, are (IMO) observable. Those happen not to require anonymity to function.

This is kinda hard to suss out in this medium, itself.

Sorry, digress. Anyway, when used as a replacement for conferences, it works pretty well. If you follow a lot of scientists or craftspeople or artists who would normally congregate in communities of interest in meatspace, they can do this here easily with a low sig/noise ratio.

It’s great for a different perspective on emergencies (an area of study of mine) and for insight into communities of interest that aren’t just the crafty-arty-nerdy sort you might have little or no exposure to... marginalized communities or folks with disabilities etc.

But that’s increasingly drowned out by the bad-default-enabled part of Twitter, which is sadly (but predictably) dialed to 11 by those defaults.

That is, basically, thumbing folks in the eye to feed your Id, because you can here with no negative consequences (besides soul rot). Which is a part of Twitter that absolutely requires anonymity to work.

None of the folks who use Twitter to vent their spleen get anything out of this space and largely make it *work* to keep it tolerable, because you have to constantly update your parameters to whack-a-mole if you weigh in on any conversation that triggers the trollnami.